Re: Will tree-ssa be GCC 3.5?

[Phil Edwards <phil at codesourcery dot com>]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 06:48:07PM -0800, Jim Wilson wrote:
> 
> That is also why I mentioned maintaining gcc3 and gcc4 in parallel.  It 
> isn't a tragedy if a front end is missing from gcc4 if we are still 
> supporting it in gcc3.

All your points are good ones, {and,but} they're the same reasons why we
might continue to release 3.x even after 3.x+1 has been forked.  That is,
it doesn't strike me as anything different than just calling it 3.5.

Also, I'd feel silly if we start a 4.x series and continue to change the
libstdc++ ABI on almost every release.

Sorry, I just don't see what we gain from calling it 4.x when there's
no user-visible change big enough to deserve a bump in the major number.
Say that tree-ssa enables us to add a bunch of optimizations, and we do,
and the inlining strategies settle down, and compile times stop going
through the roof, and we can selectively enable/disable warnings inside
code, and do all the other things that our users have been asking for --
once those things are /done/, then we can hold up 4.0 and say, "Behold!"
As things stand, we'd be forking a branch, gcc3 would receive almost no
attention, and all we could say to the users is, "We hope that 4.x will
eventually earn its name."

-- 
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
    - Brian W. Kernighan